For young girls watching the Lionesses Euro victories and the growth of the Women’s Super League, playing football felt within reach. Many now wanted to emulate their heroes on the pitch. The FA reported that between 2020 and 2024, the number of women and girls playing football has increased by 56 per cent. For clubs like Girls Pro, this has created the perfect storm.
Girls Pro, A Hertfordshire club running teams for girls from ages 7-12, were founded by chairman Joe Finn. Based in London Colney, Girls Pro currently have 120 players on the books with 90 already in the ETC ( Emerging Talent Centre) system, playing across various clubs in the South East.
Finn, who had spells at Arsenal, West Ham and Watford as a youth player recollects:
“While I was injured, the coach suggested I go and do my coaching badges. I got my B licence at 19 but then coaching wasn’t really for me. I completely fell out of love with football for 10 years, because of my injury.
During that period I met my wife and had my two children. When COVID hit, I saw some friends and their kids playing football. My daughter just said “Can I go and play?”
She loved it straight away and I fell back in love with football because of her. She had a trial at Arsenal but was training with them as the academies don’t start until they are 12. Her and my younger daughter played for Bedwell whilst training with Arsenal.
One of the dads said in passing “well, you’ve got your coaching badges, why don’t you just start a team?” I took a throwaway comment and thought, yeah I can do that” That’s how Girls Pro began.”
“Initially, it was just to start that one team and then ended up going to all the local and national tournaments and winning them. So our name got out there quickly and we started a second team.
More and more girls kept coming and I think we’re up to 12 teams now in three years. The aim now is much like what the boys have, so high-level boys grassroots football compared to academy level. Whereas girls grassroots football to girls academy-level football, there’s a huge disparity between the two.
So our aim is to position ourselves in the middle to take a girl that maybe hasn’t played football before, coach them and give them really good training and give them a nice facility in which they feel like a professional.”
Since rekindling his love of the sport through his daughters, Finn has only wanted to dedicate his time to girls football.
“To be honest, I never really ever looked at boys’ football because I didn’t have a son, and because the girls that I was coaching were so good.
If you have a son and you’re in boys’ football, you don’t really experience girls at all. You don’t really ever get to see girls play because, like with most grassroots teams, the girls play on a different night to the boys.”
Through his experience with coaching, Finn has noticed a disparity between girls and boys grassroots football:
“The boys take priority over everything. They get priority match daytime, so the boys’ side of things never ever really shows on the girls’ side, and the girls never really see the boys,
it really was evident, particularly at a young age, where girls just seem to get things really quickly. They take direction and they put the direction straight into match play.”
Girls Pro’s approach has led to a plethora of success but Finn is keen to praise the efforts of the players for this success: He notes:
“From a technical perspective the girls are probably there or thereabouts, compared with boys from aged 12 and down, but they just lack that injection of intensity, and our major focus is just to make sure that we give them the technical training, but make sure that they always understand that football is a game first. But also, you have to bring the right mentality, the right intensity levels.
Finn is a strong believer that the formula of Girls Pro is a success one and has seen the evidence himself:
I think it’s just a formula that works, and we’re a feeder club now to Arsenal, Chelsea, Spurs, Watford, Stevenage and Cambridge. The girls are doing so well.”
Finn’s dedication to the cause has led him to remortgage his house. The club are looking for funding to help develop and expand their facilities to the next level. Finn said:
“So I remortgaged my house to buy the ground. I didn’t make the wife very happy with it, but what can you do?
We’ve currently got a grass pitch, but ideally, what we would like to do is try and get some funding in so that we can transfer that to an astro turf. The pitch that we’ve got at the moment is really nice but if we had lots of footfall through it, it would soon get torn up, and then once it gets torn up, it means less girls are playing, and then less girls playing is not what we want.
We want more girls playing and trying to raise that standard. So ideally, we would like to try and get some sponsorship or investment into the actual AstroTurf or the funding of the AstroTurf, so we can get more girls playing, essentially.”
